'The Mandalorian' Gets Much-Needed Direction In 'The Gunslinger' [Episode 5 Review]

We’re now more than halfway through the initial season of “The Mandalorian” and the only thing we know for sure is that the breakout star of the series is a tiny puppet that the Internet has lost its collective mind over. Beyond that, everything else is delightfully up-in-the air. “Star Wars” is an inherently episodic endeavor, but “The Mandalorian” has embraced that wholeheartedly, leaning into the relative cheapness of its production value and the serialized quality of its plotting. Each week our main character (Pedro Pascal) lands on a planet, gets involved in some sort of adventure, and leaves before the end of the episode. Lather, rinse, repeat. (In a way it’s the opposite of the other TV show the Internet is freaking out about right now, “Watchmen,” a show built of intricate, cascading parts.)

With this fifth episode, “The Mandalorian” carefully layers in nostalgic touchstones while also hinting towards where the show will be headed, concluding with an OMG-worthy cliffhanger ending that’ll have fans endlessly theorizing until next week’s episode drops.

The episode (titled “Chapter 5: The Gunslinger”) starts with our first “Mandalorian” space battle, as a rival bounty hunter follows our hero and his charge in their slick chrome ship The Razorcrest. This chase sequence has the same feeling of “Star Wars on television” that much of the series does; it’s smaller, more compact, and more economical but still able to thrill. After the Mandalorian’s ship takes some damage, he retreats to a nearby planet: Tatooine, and specifically the spaceport of Mos Eisley, that wretched hive of scum and villainy immortalized in ‘A New Hope‘ and foggily revisited in ‘The Phantom Menace.’ While there, he meets a mechanic (Amy Sedaris!) and, to pay for the repairs, uneasily teams up with a fellow mercenary (Jake Cannavale) to take down a ruthless assassin (Ming-Na Wen).

That’s a pretty delicious set-up for an episode and luckily, this episode doesn’t disappoint. As written and directed by animation veteran Dave Filoni (he also helmed the pilot), Episode 5 does a little with a lot. The episode offers a ton of action (certainly more than last week’s more naturalistic, “Seven Samurai“-indebted installment), and you can feel Filoni’s grasp of live-action staging and cutting becoming more fully formed. There’s a snappiness to the set pieces and confidence that the first episode lacked. And, thankfully, there aren’t that many fan-approved callbacks to the original depictions of Tatooine, thank the maker, which is a huge surprise given Filoni’s deep love of the core mythology and his compulsion to embellish that mythology endlessly.

What Filoni focuses on instead is the ragged psychology of bounty hunting. He explores the profession in a way that previous episodes hadn’t thought to engage with (odd, considering how many of the characters are bounty hunters of one kind or another). The moral compass that is guiding the Mandalorian isn’t shared by others in his profession, and the push and pull of that conflict makes for some great drama in this episode and helps to more clearly define who the Mandalorian is, which is always helpful considering we can’t see his face or read his emotions.

And the cliffhanger at the end of the episode suggests something larger and more prolonged. It doesn’t say anything huge about where the show is headed, per se, but it introduces a wrinkle that could be played out over several episodes instead of getting wrapped up in the largely stand-alone style of the series. This shift, however minor, feels necessary and essential.

As much fun as having a mini “Star Wars” movie every week has been (and as cute as the Child/Baby Yoda undoubtedly is), there needs to be something more. There’s a need to establish bigger stakes and a larger threat along with introducing a plan for the Mandalorian that feels somewhat more structured and long-term than just zipping off to a random planet every week. There are a number of fascinating chess pieces still left on the board and currently unaccounted for (including the characters played by Werner Herzog, Carl Weathers, Gina Carano, and Taika Waititi), and it’ll be fun to see, in future weeks, whether or not they’ll return (and in what capacity). Right now, what we really need is some direction for our bounty hunter and his adorable sidekick. Otherwise, he could soon find himself floating in space. And nobody wants that. [B]